Documentary Film and New Technologies – MIT Discussion Panel

Summary:
Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. What are the implications for makers and viewers of documentaries of today's unprecedented [...]

Emerging digital technologies are opening powerful new ways to create and even to reconceptualize the documentary film. How will handheld video cameras and ubiquitous open-source computing change the nature of documentaries? What are the implications for makers and viewers of documentaries of today’s unprecedented access to online editing and distribution tools, to an ocean of data never before available to the general public? These and related questions will be central to our discussion. Panelists will include a scholar of digital culture, a producer who has begun to exploit emerging technologies, and a representative of a newly-important specialty of the digital age — a curator of digital artifacts.

Speakers

Gerry Flahive is a producer for the National Film Board of Canada. He has produced more than 50 films and new media projects including Project Grizzly, Waterlife and Highrise.

Shari Frilot is senior programmer for the Sundance Film Festival and curator of the New Frontier sectionof the event.

Ingrid Kopp is the new media consultant at the Tribeca Film Institute where she runs the TFI New Media Fund. Launched in 2011 with the support of the Ford Foundation, the funds seeks to develop interactive, non-fiction projects centered around issues of social justice.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democraciesand coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavation in History and Memories.

Moderator:

William Uricchio is professor and director of MIT Comparative Media Studies and professor of comparative media history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His books include Media Cultures(2006), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, New Collectivities and Europe (2009).

by mit.edu

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